Cleveland's venerable Union Club seemed like a strange place to be meeting Marcy Kaptur. The congresswoman from Toledo, now running for her fourteenth term, has a deserved reputation as a maverick - moderate on some issues, liberal to radical on others - who takes no prisoners when she speaks her mind. She is known as a friend to labour unions and a leader in the fight against Nafta and other free-trade initiatives, which have hit hard in industrial areas such as her north-west Ohio district. Both the unemployment rate and the home foreclosure rate in Toledo are well above the national average.

Kaptur became something of a YouTube folk hero in September when she took to the floor of the Congress for a series of fiery speeches denouncing the proposed taxpayer-funded bailout of "Wall Street's big banking boys." These "plunderers of our economy", she declared, were "now are running home to mama" for government help. "They want mama to make it all better." As the bill was hammered out, Kaptur protested that "only a few insiders" were making the deal and ramming it through Congress without the usual committee proceedings, hearings or review. "These criminals have so much political power they can shut down the normal legislative process of the highest law making body of this land," she said. "We are constitutionally sworn to protect and defend this republic against all enemies foreign and domestic. And my friends, there are enemies."

Kaptur was very rushed the day we met her, and her press aide hit upon the Union Club, where the congresswoman had a business meeting scheduled for later in the afternoon as a place to meet. It was an incongruous setting.The club dates from the late 19th century, when the burgeoning city of Cleveland sat astride rail corridors and waterways that connected the eastern United States to the industrialising north and the resource-rich west. John D Rockefeller built the Standard Oil Company from Cleveland, and Rockefellers numbered among the club's early members - as did five presidents (Taft, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and McKinley), six senators and two supreme court justices.

It was cold and windy when the Road to the White House senior producer Kate O'Callaghan and I strode up the steps to the club and entered its elegant lobby. A staff member who could only be described as a butler approached us, and we told him we had an appointment with Marcy Kaptur. "I am sorry," he said, looking at O'Callaghan, his upper lip slightly curled. "You will have to go."

"Go?" we asked. "Leave," he replied firmly. Women wearing jeans, he informed us, were not allowed in the club. "Believe me, she won't be the first woman asked to go," he continued. "The club has its rules. There is nothing to be done."

"But we are to meet a member of the United States Congress," I said. "What if she takes her coat off and ties it around her waist as if it were a dress." The butler shook his head. He was steering us towards the door.

Suddenly, a cheery man appeared and announced that he was Kaptur's press aide. He and the butler consulted. The butler disappeared, then returned and ushered us to an elevator. "Second floor, end of the corridor. There is a small room to the side where business is conducted," he said.

It was against this strange background that we interviewed the no-nonsense Kaptur, who grew up in Toledo in a Polish Catholic working-class family, and has her own definite ideas about what should be done for the failing economy. She believes that the government should immediately sit down with borrowers and work out the delinquent loans, stretching them out at a lower interest rate. An emergency session of Congress should be called after the election to enact legislation, much of it modeled after the New Deal. The new government must waste no time in priming the economic pump by creating jobs. Kaptur hoped that, if elected, Obama would bring significant change for the better, but she was plainly skeptical.

The conversation turned to Joseph Wurzelbacher - the now-famous Joe the Plumber - who happens to live down the road from the congresswoman. Nobody in her community, she told us, seemed to know who he was. "I wonder," she said, "if they put him there because of me. Do they really think like that? Who would have thought?"

In fact, just a few days earlier, Wurzelbacher had told several right-wing news outlets that he was considering a run for Congress - in Kaptur's district, of course. "I'll tell you what," he said on one talkshow, "we'd definitely be in one heck of a fight, but you know, I'd be up for it."